YOU Are the Reward of the Cross

Two reasons that we live close to one another, and one of them is so we can drive one another crazy. So that our gospel can constantly be tested as to being adequate or inadequate, and so that we can’t live together except we know the cross. The other reason is simple: to get together, to come before the Lord, and to be with Him. If you go to church at a Baptist church—forgive me picking on the Baptists—but I can show you a printed license I have hanging on my wall that gives me the right to pick on Baptists. I have two of them. One says I can function; I can exercise in public…that was before aerobics. The other one says I am an ordained Baptist minister. If you belong to a Baptist church, you can’t get together early in the mornings to touch the Lord. You’re in too many places. Sometimes you’d have to drive 20 or 30 miles. Most of us live within one, two, or three blocks of one another, and we are always close enough to get together around the Lord Jesus Christ at any time of the day and night, and we do.

I think that one of the reasons that we all, as Christians, depend so much on the Bible—and I would trace the history of that fact—is because for the last 1700 or 1800 years we have not had a knowledge of how to touch our Lord. Therefore, we slam, bang, slam, bang, and bang and slam again: the Word, the Word, the Word, the Word, the Word, the Word, the Word. And so, we study the Bible, and we’re given promises by those who speak to us that if we will do all these marvelous things in obeying the Bible, then all these marvelous things will take place in our lives. And, brothers and sisters, they don’t ever take place. They don’t get down deep into our spirit. There is one person who’s going to get into your spirit, and that is the Lord. Therefore, we do come to the Word of God to find out how to know Him, and to discover His mind, and we use the Scripture to touch Him, but we don’t pick up the Scripture with the Scripture as an end.

Brother Mike Brodie once said something so beautiful. He said there are three people who get together every day and cry. Three people get together every day and cry: Mary, the Bible, and the Holy Spirit. And as they sit there crying together, each one of them says, “All we wanted to do was glorify Jesus Christ.” Did you understand that?  Good.

Okay, saints, we’re talking about who we are. Mike and Daniel, I will remind you that anything I say to you has to do with the church. I have made little application to your lives as individuals. Now, I’m gambling hard here. I’m gambling that you won’t go home and say this was a nice conference. I’m gambling that you will get together, the six of you, while one of you does like this. (rocking a new baby) I realize that over the next couple of months, you won’t be able to depend on Christy very much. I predict she’ll have a baby within the next three weeks. You’ve got to come back to this if necessary, or I would even encourage you to get down on your faces and say, “Lord, open our eyes, and we mean to walk this way.” You have heard the witness of other people in this room. I don’t know what more to do to cause you to be an experience of the church. Did you hear my words? An experience of the church. To be able to stand there and say, because we have experienced it…her…therefore, we have bold access to you, Lord, as the body of Christ. You are going to be built. You are being built, and all these other things. I’ve done the best I can. I have no witness to the Holy Spirit contrary to that, we have failed in this, and my only evidence is that brothers and sisters don’t ever leave. Now, that’s not true. Every once in a while, somebody does. But these people are staying together like… I’m trying not to use American slang, and now I’m lost. These people hang together. They stay together. They don’t go anywhere, and they’ve got nothing holding them, not even peer pressure.

When somebody leaves you, don’t talk about them or talk about their failures and, “Oh well, we expected that because they’re such-and-such.” Well, if they stayed, you wouldn’t have said, “They leave, you know, well, we would have expected that because he’s such-and-such.” Don’t do that. If somebody leaves, you’d better stop and think that it’s your failure…but it’s not always. If someone leaves, you don’t excommunicate them, you don’t tell them God’s wrath is going to fall on them, you don’t tell them they’re leaving the body of Christ that they have… oh gosh, all that garbage that is floating around in this world today. What you do is you go help them pack. You load their car, their U-Haul, and their truck together with them. Just before they get in the car and drive off, you praise the Lord with them and send them with God’s blessings, and if you don’t do that, I’ll come out of my grave to say to you…I’ll probably drag a chain through your hall in the middle of the night.

Where did we leave off? We left off in verse 10, didn’t we? Boy, I’m going to make quick work of some of this. A body of believers who meet in Constance. A body of believers who meet in Chicago. A body of believers who gather in Denver. A body of believers who gather in Philadelphia, or whoever you are, you gather, and you’re part of that body. Hopefully, you might have some of the attributes that we have talked about here.

Verse 11: …have obtained an inheritance: not a person but a people. You were predestined as a people, and that was the way He planned it, according to His purpose. That’s the way He planned it, who works all things after the counsel of His will. So, you have an inheritance. And the end of this plan, this unfolding plan, is that we might be a praise of His glory, or a praise…yeah, we will be a praise to His glory in Jesus Christ. Or perhaps this is the Father; I’m going to say Jesus Christ here. It’s not too easy to say.

Thirteen: You also—you, that was, by the way, a Jew speaking, and here he’s talking to us heathen. In Christ, you also, as well as I, Paul, and my people, of the truth, the gospel of salvation. Having also believed—and you in Colossae believed, and you in Constance believed, and you are believers, and you can’t help but believe, and tonight you will believe, and you do believe. When you believed, there was the Holy Spirit, and in the first century, because Jesus had said there would be a promise, He made a promise that the Holy Spirit would come, and that promise was fulfilled, by the way, to the shock of many. The Holy Spirit was often referred to as the Holy Spirit of promise—the promised Holy Spirit. The promised Holy Spirit came to you, and you were sealed into Christ by means of the Holy Spirit who was promised to you. Now I’m not going to stop on a lot of these things, and let me say: you got sealed—if you want to, you got sealed up in Him. You won’t leak out anymore. You were sealed. I know it’s speaking of a seal that’s put on, but I’m going to have to cover a lot of territory here this evening. Who? The Holy Spirit, a person who is given as a down payment, as proof of your total inheritance.

Now I need to say this to you. You have forgotten what your internal parts were like before you received the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit came into you for a multitude of reasons, the first one being to glorify the Son of God. The Holy Spirit came into you as a promise of a full inheritance. The Holy Spirit has been given to you; every one of you at some point in your life received the Holy Spirit. In fact, you’re not a Christian if you have not received the Holy Spirit. If the Holy Spirit does not live in you, then you’re illegitimate. I don’t want to spook anybody out here, but I want to make a point. I want you all to listen to it.

It was John of the Cross who wrote a poem, Dark Night of the Soul. Well, the Catholics don’t know that man has a spirit. They only got from Aristotle that man is body and soul, and they have accepted that as their teaching. Therefore, when he spoke of the soul, he was actually speaking of the experience he had with the spirit. Now, I don’t want to spook you out, and I don’t want to get off the subject. You cannot lose the Holy Spirit, but there have been rare, thank God, rare experiences in which the sense of the Holy Spirit has left a believer—it is a horrifying experience. You don’t know that you have become comfortable with an indwelling Spirit. You literally have forgotten.

Jeanne Guyon made the statement that in all the years—and she lived in the Bastille—she had a little window about like this to look through, and it was about 12 feet above her head. I’m sorry, it was about 12 feet up. And the door was locked, and it stayed locked. About the only time it ever opened was… well, it didn’t even open for food. The only time it ever opened, as far as I know, was when the Archbishop walked in with a paper, burst in without announcement, and said, “Sign this, and you can go.” She read it, tore it up, and threw it in his face. She said that in all the years that she was in the Bastille of France, in Paris, France, she never once felt the presence of the Lord. She said, “I didn’t have to. I am not dependent on a sense of the presence of my Lord.” She worshipped Him, praised Him, and was faithful to Him, and glorified Him in that cell by faith alone. Put that as a standard to live by.